A prospect includes an area of exploration in which hydrocarbons have been predicted to exist in economic quantity. A prospect may include an anomaly, such as a geologic structure or a seismic amplitude anomaly that is recommended by explorationists for drilling a well. Justification for drilling a prospect is made by assembling evidence for an active petroleum system, or reasonable probability of encountering reservoir-quality rock, a trap of sufficient size, adequate sealing rock, and appropriate conditions for the generation and migration of hydrocarbons to fill the trap. A single drilling location is also called a prospect, but the term is generally used in the context of exploration: exploration prospect assessment (EPA), hereinafter referred to as Prospect Assessment (PA).
A group of prospects of a similar nature constitutes a play. Thus, a play is a region in which hydrocarbon accumulations or prospects of a given type may occur: a conceptual model for a style of hydrocarbon accumulation used by explorationists to develop prospects in a basin, region, or trend and used by development personnel to continue exploiting a given trend. A play (or a group of interrelated plays) may occur in a single petroleum system.
Common Risk Segment Mapping (CRSM) is an exploration method to define areas of low exploration risk. Certain companies employ some method of play fairway mapping and common risk mapping. These may be used to define play Chance of Success (play COS) at the play level and local prospect Chance of Success (prospect COS) at the prospect level. “Traffic light” maps of red, yellow and green for high, moderate and low risk areas are examples of displays in the industry. CRSM maps that combine the geological elements that determine the Chance of Success of plays and prospects may be further combined with maps that delineate other risk elements that affect the overall prospectivity in an area, for example, distance from shore, water depth, accessibility to acreage, and so forth.
Play-based exploration may have a different focus than prospect-based exploration. Beyond the traffic light maps, there may be maps that show shared/play-specific and local/prospect-specific probabilities. A problem with these conventional probability and Chance of Success maps, however, may be the relative complexity of arriving at the map itself, such that if a geological condition changes, or when the explorationist changes a hypothetical or a geological property underpinning the map, the map has to be reconfigured and recalculated, which may be a conventionally painstaking process.
Play fairway mapping, common risk mapping, and Chance of Success mapping conventionally depend on numerous complex processes. The shear amount of input data through which the user may need to sort can make map creation difficult and sometimes non-intuitive. Additionally, there may be a lack of information on how to accomplish the exploration workflows. Easy-to-use tools may be needed to give fast results and simplify the clutter of inputting data for the process of creating the Chance of Success maps and evaluating the results.